21 September 2015

Root vegetable pie with a skin-on mash topping

Autumn cooking can be so great, as I
noticed again tonight. How have I missed the hearty potato mash
topped pies! It's not really cold enough yet for proper winter
dishes, but since it's late September, I find that a few pies can be
made. So I found that a root vegetable pie was in order for a Monday
dinner.

I want to share this recipe with this
month's Vegetable Palette vegetarian cooking challenge hosted
by Shaheen from A2K - A Seasonal Veg Table,
which is very much the inspiration for this recipe anyway. Vegetable
Palette's theme for September is “purple and blues” and this very
much caught my imagination. During the whole month I was considering
so many options for purple or blue recipes by using different
vegetables and it was getting difficult to decide. I just didn't
necessarily want to resort to blueberries, which I would've done, if
no other good idea would've come along. Luckily I found these purple
carrots and purple garlic, which somehow wanted to go into hearty
pie, and I paired them with some golden beetroots and also fairly
purple red onion. It's probably my twisted sense of humour that
instead of the naturally purple beetroot, I used its golden cousin.
Well, it did work well together. This recipe is also very easy to
veganise, I just preferred using butter and cheese in the mash.

Here is the recipe for my purple
root vegetable pie:

For the filling:

100 g purple carrots

4 golden beetroots

1/3 cup puy lentils

1 large red onion

3 purple garlic cloves

Olive oil

A dash of dry cider (I used organic
Black Fox cider)

1-2 tbsp vegetable stock powder

Sage

Thyme

Salt

Ground black pepper

For the topping:

500 g potatoes

2 tbsp butter or margarine

1 tsp salt

50 g grated Emmental (optional)

Method:

Cook the potatoes in salt water until
they are done. Drain most of the water off, but leave a little bit of
it in the pan, add the butter, salt and cheese and mash. Set to side.

Peel the root vegetables and cut them
into cubes. Chop the red onion fairly coarsely and the garlic finely
and start cooking these in olive oil. After a few minutes, add the
root vegetables. After again a few minutes, add a dash of cider and
vegetable stock powder and let simmer. Add a little bit water, if
needed.

In the meanwhile cook the lentils in
water in a separate pot.

Once the vegetables are almost done,
add the lentils and seasoning. Let simmer for a while until the
flavours have blended nicely, season to taste.

Put the root vegetable and lentil mix
onto the bottom of an oven dish and spread the mash on it as cover.
Make any patterns on the top, as you desire and bake in the oven at
200C for about 25 minutes until the mash is baked golden brown.

Enjoy the pie warm on a cosy autumn
night. I'm also looking forward to having it tomorrow as lunch.

2 comments:

This is awesome, I love your innovative use of purple veg - carrots, red onion and purple garlic, that is a new one one me and am curious. Thanks for participating, I really do appreciate your support and contributions. The round up will be up soon.

Oh thank you, suddenly I started finding purple veg everywhere. :) Purple garlic was a new one for me as well, it's quite succulent and tasty. I think it doesn't store as well, it has slightly fresher feel to it.

Who is The VegHog?

A vegetarian hobby cook and urban gardener born in Finland, currently living in Denmark. I try to develop my cooking skills by making a wide variety of veggie dishes, some of them traditional and some new creations. My favourites include veggie burgers, squashes, organic and local produce, cider, spelt, rye, pizzas, pasta dishes, risottos and sea-buckthorn.
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